File Systems

Local File Systems

General Tips For Any File System

Combat Fragmentation

Fragmentation happens when the data placement of files is not contiguous on disk, causing time-consuming head seeks when reading or writing a file.

MythTV recordings on disk can become quite fragmented, due to several factors, such as the fact that MythTV writes large files over a very long period of time, the fact that recording files may have drastically different sizes, and the fact that many MythTV systems have multiple capture cards--allowing for recording multiple shows at once. Note, also, that any time MythTV is recording multiple shows to a single filesystem (even if in different directories and/or in different Storage Groups), the recordings will necessarily be fragmented.

Configuring multiple local filesystems within MythTV's Storage Groups will allow MythTV to write recordings to separate filesystems, thereby minimizing fragmentation. Therefore, the best approach to combat fragmentation is to ensure each computer running mythbackend has at least as many local (and available) filesystems as capture cards. If using a combination of local and network-mounted filesystems, you may need to adjust the Storage Groups Weighting to cause MythTV to write to network-mounted filesystems (though doing so may negatively impact performance, meaning the use of a sufficient number of local filesystems or the use of only network-mounted filesystems is preferred). The availability of a filesystem is somewhat dependent on that filesystem having space available for writing (i.e. having 2 filesystems for 2 capture cards with one filesystem completely full and the other only half full will not help prevent fragmentation, though if both are full, autoexpiration should allow either to be used).

Fragmentation can be measured by the "filefrag" command on most any filesystem.

Disabling File Access Time Logging

Most filesystems log the access times of files. Generally this file metadata shouldn't be necessary, however, if for some strange reason you experience problems, then don't apply this tweak.

To disable the logging of file access times, add the "noatime" and "nodiratime" options to your /etc/fstab:

Using "relatime" Mount Option

You may also wish to look into the "relatime" mount option to improve performance, but still have file atime updated. For more information on this (and related discussion), see: Linux: Replacing atime With relatime

XFS-Specific Tips

Combat Fragmentation

Under XFS, an additional command can be used to measure filesystem fragmentation: "xfs_bmap".

The xfs filesystem has a mount option which can help combat this fragmentation: allocsize

This essentially causes xfs to speculatively preallocate 512m of space at a time for a file when writing, and can greatly reduce fragmentation. For example on my box with HD streams that typically take about 3Gb for an hour of video, I used to get thousands of extents. This is largely due to the fsync loop in the file writer, which un-does any benefit that xfs's delayed allocation would otherwise provide. With the allocsize mount option as above, now I get at most 30 or so extents, because the periodic fsync now flushes to pre-allocated blocks.

For files which are already heavily fragmented, the xfs_fsr command (from the xfsdump package) can be used to defragment individual files, or an entire filesystem.

Run the following command to determine how fragmented your filesystem is:

xfs_db -c frag -r /dev/hdd1

xfs_fsr with no parameters will run for two hours. The -t parameter specifies how long it runs in seconds. It keeps track of where it got up to and can be run repeatedly. It can be added to our crontab to periodically defragment your disk. Add the following to /etc/crontab:

30 1 * * * root /usr/sbin/xfs_fsr -t 21600 >/dev/null 2>&1

to run it every night at 1:30 for 6 hours.

Don't forget to see the complete XFS_Filesystem wiki page that includes general info about XFS, defragmenting, disk checking and maintenance, etc.

Changing Number of Log Buffers

An interesting tweak mentioned in Filesystem Performance Tweaking with XFS is to change the number of log buffers used by XFS. This tweak can improve both sequential and random file creation and deletion times. The default depends on your filesystem's blocksize, and each log buffer takes up 32K of RAM. SGI (the company who created XFS) advises against using 8 on a system with 128M of RAM or less. Since most systems have more than 128M of RAM nowadays, it should be safe to increase the number of logbuffers for XFS. Note that the maximum number of logbuffers is 8, and that blocksize is limited to your system's memory pagesize (blocksize <= pagesize).

By default, XFS adjusts this depending on your filesystem's blocksize:

logbufs=value
Set the number of in-memory log buffers. Valid numbers range
from 2-8 inclusive. The default value is 8 buffers for filesys‐
tems with a blocksize of 64KiB, 4 buffers for filesystems with a
blocksize of 32KiB, 3 buffers for filesystems with a blocksize
of 16KiB and 2 buffers for all other configurations. Increasing
the number of buffers may increase performance on some workloads
at the cost of the memory used for the additional log buffers
and their associated control structures.

Look for the bsize=X listed in the output. This value is reported in bytes. Note: My listed value was 4096 bytes (4 KiB), and I have 2GB of RAM, so I set it to 8. This configuration will use up (32 KiB) * 8 = 256 KiB for the log buffers in RAM.

To perform this tweak, edit your /etc/fstab and add the "logbufs=X" option, where X is 2 to 8 inclusive. More log buffers will allow more system RAM to be used for filesystem log caching. This should theoretically increase performance, and according to benchmarks in Filesystem Performance Tweaking with XFS, it did for that user.

Optimizing XFS on RAID Arrays

Some more RAID specific tweaks for XFS were found in this helpful article: Optimizing XFS on RAID Arrays. This section is a slightly reformatted version of that article.

XFS has builtin optimizations for reading data from RAID arrays. These options can be specified at mkfs time or at mount time (you can even set them while the system is running using the mount -o remount command) and can affect the performance of your system.

There are two parameters for tweaking how XFS handles your RAID arrays (there are actually four, but you only need to use these two): sunit and swidth. sunit is the stripe unit and swidth is the stripe width. The stripe unit sits on a single disk while the stripe width spans the entire array; in this way the sunit is similar to the stripe size of your array.

Before you begin, you’ll need to know:

What type of RAID array you’re using

The number of disks in the array

The stripe size (aka the chunk size in software RAID).

For RAID{1,0,10} arrays, the number of “disks” is equal to the number of spindles.

For RAID{5,6} arrays, the number of disks is equal to N-1 for RAID5 and N-2 for RAID6, where N is the number of spindles.

If you guessed that the sunit is equal to your stripe size, you’re almost correct. The sunit is measured in 512-byte block units (from the mount man page), so for a 64kB blocksize your sunit=128, for 256kB use sunit=512.

Note: To find your blocksize, use the following command, and look for bsize=X in output:

# replace /dev/md0 with your device's name
xfs_info /dev/md0

As mentioned before, the swidth spans the entire array, but is also measured in 512-byte blocks, so you’ll want to multiply the number of disks calculated above by the sunit for your stripe size.

Examples

A 4-disk RAID0 array with a 64kB stripe size will have a sunit of 128 and a swidth of 4*128=512. Your mkfs.xfs and mount commands would thus be:

#Note that you should only need to use one of these. You may also add the sunit and swidth options to /etc/fstab to make the second one permanent.
mkfs.xfs -l sunit=128,swidth=512 /dev/whatever
mount -o remount,sunit=128,swidth=512

An 8-disk RAID6 array with a 256kB stripe size will have a sunit of 512 and a swidth of (8-2)*512=3072. Your commands would thus be:

Network File Systems

Disable NFS file attribute caching

if you are using SMB (not CIFS), you can try the ttl option using "-o ttl=100" which should set your timeout lower than the default. The default is supposed to be 1000ms which equals 1 second, but one user has reported that setting ttl=100 corrected the issue for him, so SMB users can give it a try.

NFS servers

Ensure that your NFS server is running in 'async' mode (configured in /etc/exports). The default for many NFS servers is 'async', but recent versions of debian now default to 'sync', which can result in very low throughput and the dreaded "TFW, Error: Write() -- IOBOUND" errors. Example of setting async in /etc/exports:

/mnt/store 192.168.1.3/32(rw,async)

There are a few other NFS mount options that can help, such as "intr", "rsize", "wsize", "nfsvers=3", "actimeo=0" , "noatime" and "tcp". You can read the man pages for a more detailed description, but suggestions are below. (Please note that "soft" mentioned here before is prone to cause file corruption).

nfsvers=3 - This tells the client to use NFS3, which is better. Of course, the server has to also support it.

actimeo=0 - disable this attribute caching to allow the frontend to see updates from the backend quicker. The problem has been seen where LiveTV fails to transition from one program to another. The cache file attribute prevents the frontend from opening the new file promptly. This also causes more load on the server if that is a issue.

tcp - This tells NFS to use TCP instead of UDP. This seems to be *very* important for high speed networks (ie, 1000mbit), mixed networks and probably isn't a bad idea in any case.

intr - Makes I/O to a NFS mounted filesystem interuptable if the server is down. If not given the I/O becomes a uninteruptable sleep which causes the process to be impossible to kill until the server comes up again.

soft - If the NFS server becomes unavailable the NFS client will generate "soft" errors instead of hanging. Some software will handle this well, other much less well. In the later case file corruption will result. For a frontend node that does reading only it might still be a reasonable setting.

Devices

Ethernet Full-Duplex Mode

Make sure that your ethernet adapters are running in full duplex mode. Check your current configuration with this command:

ethtool eth0

Typically both sides will be configured for autonegotiation by default and you will get the best possible connection automatically but there are conditions--typically involving old or buggy hardware--when this may not happen. The following can be used to disable autonegotiation and force a 100base-T network adapter into full duplex mode, when autonegotiation is failing.

ethtool -s eth0 speed 100 duplex full autoneg off

This problem can exhibit itself with "IOBOUND" errors in your logs.

Note: To use full-duplex mode, your network card must be connected to a switch (not a hub) and the switch must be configured to allow full-duplex operation (almost always the default) on the ports that are being used. By definition, a network switch supports full duplex operation and a network hub (sometimes referred to as a repeater) does not. If you are connecting to a hub, full-duplex operation will not be possible. Most switches support using 100base-T (Fast Ethernet) as well as 10base-T, while most hubs will only use 10base-T, and while a few 100base-T hubs (and 10base-T switches) do exist, they are quite rare. Gigabit switches can reliably be expected to handle both fast ethernet and normal ethernet connections in addition to the gigabit ethernet speeds.

Problems will arise if only one side of a connection supports full duplex or if one side only supports autonegotiation and can not be manually configured. It should be noted that most cheap switches and home routers do not support manual port configuration which will result in them autonegotiating to a half duplex connection if the computer is forced to full duplex as shown above. Forced connections can't advertise what they are so the autonegotiating side must assume half duplex so you will actually be creating a problem if the now forced connection was already full duplex. Nearly all of the time, using autonegotiation on all of the equipment will give you the best possible results. If you encounter problems with autonegotiation you can opt to manually configure settings for that device but it is highly recommended that you manually configure every piece of equipment on that segment as well.

Hard Disks

DMA Access

MythTV is very demanding of disks, and can demand a sizeable amount of throughput from the disks to be available to operate properly, although it may not at first be obvious quite how much is actually needed. When watching LiveTV on a PVR card (for instance), if MythTV is all on one machine for you, the backend is writing to the ringbuffer, while the frontend is simultaneously reading from it, so just watching TV uses twice the disk resources that one might at first think. Filesystem caching can usually reduce the impact of this, but not always. If you are getting repeated messages from MythTV complaining that the ringbuffer file is not available, it's likely that DMA access has gone wrong in your configuration and caused your disks to become very slow.

First, check to see if DMA access has been enabled for the drive you are using. Running `hdparm /dev/hdx` for each drive will tell you (the using_dma setting) whether or not DMA has been enabled.
Under normal conditions, the kernel will always enable DMA support for any and all drives and controllers that support the feature (which is basically everything that shouldn't be in a museum by now). If DMA has not been enabled, usually the kernel will have said something in the syslog/dmesg as to why it refused to enable DMA support. Solve whatever problem it's referring to before continuing. Remember that you really do need an 80-conductor IDE cable for DMA transfers to work reliably. 40-conductor cables are fine for optical drives, but not for magnetic disks. If you're still using a 40-conductor cable, replace it even if it seemed to work just fine--high speed transfers are not reliable without the 80-conductor cable.

There is a "Generic PCI bus-master DMA support" option in the kernel that will enable DMA support, but this by itself results in rather slow (<6MB/s) throughput. Run `hdparm -t /dev/hdx` while the machine is relatively non-busy and you should see a number around 16MB/s, 33MB/s or sometimes even higher (SATA and SCSI drives and RAID arrays will often show even higher numbers). If you see a very low number, then you need to enable support for the specific chipset of your disk controller in the kernel. If you are booting from this controller, you must compile the chipset support for it directly into the kernel and not as a module.

If DMA access is still not available, you can try to force it on by using the command `hdparm -d1 -X /dev/hdx`. Use this only as a last resort as enabling DMA access when the system isn't capable of properly supporting it can easily result in massive data corruption.

RAID

RAID (Redundant Array of Inexpensive Disks) is a method of utilizing multiple drives in parallel for enhanced reliability and/or performance. For the purpose of performance optimization, you can look at one of the RAID 0 (striped) configurations, to split the data between two or more drives (without redundancy) to increase throughput. More information can be found in two locations: the file storage page, and the RAID page.

Capture Cards

For backend machines, or machines that are a combination frontend/backend, the type of capture card used will impact performance. With a typical analog capture card, such as the popular bttv cards, the CPU must encode the raw video to MPEG-4 or RTjpeg on the fly. When watching live TV on a combination frontend/backend machine, the machine has to both encode AND decode the video stream simultaneously.

With cards of this type, the machine's CPU doesn't have to encode the incoming video. Instead, it simply receives the MPEG-2 stream from the card and dumps it to disk. This makes the recording process a simple operation, with relatively low resource usage.

Video Cards & Hardware Accelerated Video

Several options are available for accelerating video output:

XvMC

XvMC can be used for GPU decoding of MPEG-2 on most chipsets, with MPEG-4 being support on some VIA Unichrome chipsets.

NVIDIA AGP FastWrite & Side Band Addressing

VDPAU

VDPAU is currently NVIDIA-only for the time being, but provides for GPU-accelerated decode of MPEG-1, MPEG-2, H.264, and VC-1 bitstreams, as well as post-processing of decoded video including temporal and spatial deinterlacing, inverse telecine, and noise reduction.

CPU / Processor

Clock Speed Throttling

There are several conditions in which your computer's CPU may be scaled down from its maximum clock speed:

A laptop or notebook has scaled down the CPU automatically due to being unplugged from an AC power source and running on the battery

The system has detected an unsafe thermal condition, and has scaled back the clock speed to avoid damage

The CPU speed has been configured incorrectly in the BIOS

The CPU speed has been manually configured to a lower speed at runtime

You can check your CPU's current operating frequency by running the command:

cat /proc/cpuinfo

If your system is slowing down because it is at its thermal limits, the only real option is to beef up your cooling capacity. This could be in the form of a larger heatsink, a larger fan, or even liquid cooling. A CPU that is incorrectly configured in the BIOS should be easy to check and easy to fix, but take care that you don't unintentionally overclock it in the process. Changing a manual control or overriding an automatic speed control will likely be distribution-dependent, or subject to your choice of adjustment tools.

Operating System

Kernel Configuration

If you're compiling your own kernel, you might want to try out the following options:

Processor Family

Ensure that the "Processor Family" (in "Processor Type and Features") is configured correctly.

IDE Controller

Preemptible Kernel

Kernel preemption allows high priority threads to interrupt even kernel operations -- this ensures the lowest possible latency when responding to important events. (Note: apparently some IVTV drivers show stability problems with a preemptible kernel.)

Timer Frequency

Increasing the scheduler's timer frequency to 1000Hz can reduce latency between multiple threads of execution (at a small cost to overall performance), e.g. when recording/playing multiple video streams.

Realtime Threads

The mythfrontend & mythtv threads can be configured to run with "realtime" priorities - if the frontend is configured this way, and if sufficient privileges are available to the user running mythfrontend.

The HOWTO has an excellent section on how to set your system up to enable this (look for "Enabling real-time scheduling of the display thread.") You will also need to select "Enable Realtime Priority Threads" in the General Playback frontend setup dialogue.

Realtime threads can help smooth out video and audio, because the system scheduler gives very high priority to mythtv. For more information on how this works, see the Real-Time chapter in Robert Love's great Linux Kernel Development book.

PCI Latency

Incorrect or less-than-optimal settings of PCI Latency can cause performance-related problems. See the page PCI Latency

RTC Maximum Frequency

Linux Distribution Selection

At a more fundamental level, your choice of a Linux distribution can have a large impact on the overall performance of your Myth machine. Most "modern" distributions (Fedora, Ubuntu, etc) come with default installations intended to give the best initial user experience by providing support for scores of devices & programs, with automation wherever possible. The downside to this, is that these default installations have large kernels and large numbers of background processes running to support this usage.

While any distribution can be whittled down to meet a more focused need, it takes an effort to do so. An alternative approach, is to select a distribution such as Gentoo that provides you with a blank slate by default. This allows you to add only the components you need, ensuring a clean system with minimal effort.

Other Software

Myth Frontend

The choice of an appropriate playback profile can make a huge difference in the perceived performance of your MythTV frontend. The playback profile decides which video decoder will be used, how the on-screen display is rendered, and which video filters (deinterlacing, etc) are used. The playback profile also dictates how hardware acceleration is used, which is especially important on low-end PCs or machines processing HD content.

XORG CPU Hogging

Under some circumstances, X can use huge amounts of CPU. This can be fixed in some cases by increasing its priority above the base value of 0 (i.e. to a negative value). E.g. renice -10 [pid for X]

A second way of lowering Xorg CPU usage (especially when watching hd/x.264)with NVidia cards, is to add

Option "UseEvents" "True"

to the Device section of your Xorg.conf.
(warning: although this works well for watching hd content, it's considered unstable for 3D software like gaming, etc... )

Lightweight Window Managers

While KDE & Gnome provide for a nice user experience, they also bring along a lot of baggage which is unnecessary for a dedicated Myth machine. Switching to a lightweight window manager such as WindowMaker,Fluxbox, or Ratpoison will reduce startup times and give you more available system resources at runtime.